The use of personalized URLs as the latest way to grab attention and market products started as a trickle and turned into a flood.

These URLs take recipients to their own individual landing pages (www.janesfurniture/bobsmith). There, recipients enter personalized mini-sites that greet them by name, personalize pages based on their stated preferences or information from the marketer’s database and record visitors’ behavior while on the site. Sites can range from extremely simple to vastly complex.

But what makes a personalized URL tick? Years ago, just the novelty of going to one’s own custom-created, personalized website was a sufficient draw to boost response rates. Today, personalization has become more common. What are the best practices for making personalized URLs work?

What’s in a name?

The most recognizable term for these applications is “PURL,” which is short for “personalized URL.” However, while the software for producing personalized URLs is available from more than a dozen manufacturers, the exclusive right to use the term “PURL” is claimed by Nimblefish. For this reason, you will see these applications referred to by other names, as well. These include “personalized URLs,” “response URLs” (RURLs, trademarked by XMPie), “personalized landing pages,” “personalized websites,” “one-to-one micro-websites” and even “customized websites,” although the latter is technically inaccurate.

Regardless of the medium, personalized URLs have a wide variety of uses, including direct sales, sales prospecting, customer surveying, event registrations, information dissemination, fundraising and obtaining customer and user feedback. But while personalized URLs have generated a lot of success, they have generated a lot of disappointment, too. This is primarily because of a lack of realistic expectations on the part of both 1:1 printers and their clients.

At their most basic, personalized URLs have two components: the personalized URL itself and the mini-site to which the respondent is driven. This distinction is important because the technology for creating personalized URLs, in itself, is very simple. Product differentiation is found in the design engine, the flexibility of the templates and (unless it is a point solution) the larger workflow/multichannel marketing solution into which it is built.

But the most important differentiator in personalized URL campaigns is the marketing savvy behind them. It’s possible to send out a basic invitation asking people to log into a personalized mini-site, answer a few questions and enter to win a prize and be successful. For everyone that is successful, however, there are many more that bombed.

What’s the difference between success and disaster? It is the thought process behind the campaign and how well matched the components were to the client’s goals. In other words, the difference is good marketing.

Let’s take a look at two illustrative examples discussed in “Personalized URLs: Beyond the Hype,” an educational report on this topic from Digital Printing Reports.

The Zeiterion Theatre

The Zeiterion Theatre, a regional theater in Massachusetts, wanted to move into 1:1 print marketing, but it had little data on its customers. Its print provider, Reynolds De-Walt, worked with the theatre to create a demographic profile of the “typical” patron of the Z, as the theatre is called, and then purchase mailing lists of local residents who matched this profile.

Each mailer was personalized using the prospect’s name spelled out across a set of theatre seats, saying that a seat had been “reserved” for them. Recipients were invited to log into a personalized URL for an opportunity to win free tickets. Once logged in, recipients were asked a series of qualifying questions about the types of performances they preferred and given the option to provide an email address for future communications.

The Z mailed out the piece to approximately 10,000 recipients. Twenty-one percent logged into the personalized URL. Of those, 14 percent provided their email addresses.

Why did this campaign work?

• Relevance. Before sending out the campaign, the theatre took the time to let its provider create a “best client” profile. This increased the chances that the offer would be relevant to those receiving it.

• Relative novelty. Personalized URLs are not yet commonplace among consumers. With a relevant offer, response is likely to be high. The same response rate might be more difficult to achieve in the B2B marketplace, which is more used to seeing personalized URLs. The interest level threshold and incentive value for response would likely be higher.

• Well-matched incentive. Because the target profile is people who have not yet become theatre members but who are likely to attend shows, the incentive of winning free tickets is a good one. If the incentive had been less relevant (say, a sweepstakes for a gift certificate to a local restaurant), the response might have been adversely affected.

Taser International

Taser makes incapacitation devices that jam the nervous system and are used by law enforcement. To market its product, Taser sends out tens of thousands of personalized postcards every year, sending law enforcement officers to their own personalized URLs for personalized cost analyses using the Taser system.

Once logged in, officers can input their department information. The online ROI calculator projects start-up costs and estimates injury and liability savings, the number of months to achieve payback and the initial savings after the desired time period. It also includes a 10-year impact estimate. This includes net costs saved, estimated officer injuries avoided and estimated lives saved, among others. All of the estimates and charts are calculated on the fly based on the information input by the officer.

Officers can change data based on varying scenarios and see how the value proposition changes and add upsell or cross sell items like long-range tasers or infrared sights. Once the ROI analysis is complete, all of the information is automatically sent back to the police officer by email and piped to the Taser salesperson for follow-up. The system emails the officer a 32-page brochure containing the estimates and value propositions created during the visit, then emails the Taser salesperson the same information in a custom PowerPoint presentation that can be used to present the data on a subsequent sales call to the law enforcement agency.

Why did this campaign work?

• Extreme relevance. Police departments are intimately acquainted with tasers, so the approach the company took was to give police departments the tools necessary to see the cost-benefit in their own organizations. It’s the ultimate “what’s in it for me” scenario.

• Personal involvement. By getting the police departments invested in the process, it created an involvement that ultimately led to great success.

These two case studies represent the extremes of personalized URL applications, one technologically straightforward and the other highly complex, with a full range in-between. The point here is that it’s really not the personalized URL itself that is driving success. The personalized URL is simply a tool — a response mechanism — to facilitate the campaign goals.

For some campaigns, in fact, a personalized URL is not going to be the right response mechanism. The right response mechanism might be generalized URL, QR code, 800 number, or something else. The wisdom in deploying personalized URL campaigns is knowing when they are well matched to the target audience and campaign goals.

What about databases?

Even for the simplest personalized URL campaigns, a database will be required. At least, first name, last name and address separated into different fields. Although more data is often better, what should be encouraging to 1:1 printers is that this isn’t always the case.

Success in building personalized URL (and all 1:1 campaigns) comes from the ability to create relevance to the recipient, not the number of variables you have. The level of detail you have to “build” (whether through purchasing, collecting, or refining data) actually can be relatively low as long as the data you do have is relevant. (Just look at the Zeiterion Theatre example.)

If you aren’t starting out with an in-house marketing database, you can approach this relevance two ways:

1. Target your prospect base at the outset by purchasing a qualified mailing list, either reflecting the desired target market or the current customer profile. The more qualified your initial database, the more effective the prospecting will be. Although this sounds expensive, it isn’t anymore. Purchasing and managing databases for personalized marketing used to be the domain of high-priced specialists. Today, many print shops creating and producing 1:1 applications have developed their own in-house expertise. Many offer database development and management capabilities (to be distinguished from database analytics, which is still the bailiwick of specialists).

2. On the surveys on the personalized mini-sites, include questions that will help you better understand your prospect’s purchasing habits and needs and that can be used for more precise targeting later.

Some companies use the surveys on these personalized websites to generate novelty giveaways, such as personalized tickets to events or personalized “album covers” showing recipients as their favourite rock star. This showcases the marketer’s ability to do fancy things with data, but it overlooks the real power of personalized URLs, which is to drive relevant offers.

One marketer, MindZoo, a U.S.-based marketing services company, has used its survey page extremely well. In a recent campaign, it asked prospects three key questions:

1. Which direct marketing program type reflects your primary interest (new subscriber acquisition, new customer acquisition, customer retention, CRM, no preference)?

2. Which niche marketing program type reflects your primary interest (lifestyle marketing, life-event marketing, event marketing, partner marketing, no preference)?

3. I am interested in learning how personalized URLs and landing pages can increase the effectiveness of my direct mail campaigns.

Just imagine what kind of head start this gives MindZoo’s sales force when following up with respondents! This is data gathering with long-term relationships in mind.

Likewise, in the Taser campaign, the company gathered information from law enforcement agencies that included the size of the agency, the number of officers and other information critical to future targeted marketing. It also allowed Taser to personalize an estimate for each law enforcement agency on the fly, including the number of lives saved, the number of officer injuries presented, the liability savings, injury cost savings and total return on investment. The sales angle here is obvious.

At the same time, however, you need to be discerning in how you collect this data. You don’t want to invite recipients to a personalized URL on the premise of entering a sweepstakes only to barrage them with invasive questions that scream, “Give us all your personal information so our salespeople can hound you later!”

There is a line between information-gathering and scaring or offending your prospects so that they never get past the survey page. That line has to be walked carefully, and that’s where good marketing comes in.

Using personalized URLs

As the personalized URL market continues to evolve, one of the areas of rapid growth is the application of these campaigns to a wide variety of marketing needs. “Personalized URLs: Beyond the Hype” breaks these applications down into six primary categories:

Lead generation. When we think about personalized URLs, we tend to think about lead generation. Indeed, this is the category in which most of the case study applications fall. Traditional methods of lead generation have extremely low response rates, so marketers have historically relied on volume. By using the increasingly well-developed strategies for using personalized URLs, however, marketers can turn static, low-response lead generation into a more effective and higher “response marketing” tool.

Direct sales/cross-sells and upsells. We don’t see personalized URLs used as often for direct sales as we do for other types of campaigns; but when we do, they are most often used for cross-sells and upsells to an existing customer base.

Event registrations. Personalized URLs are a quick and easy way to enable people to respond to an invitation to sign up for a seminar, attend an event, or anything else that requires registration while, at the same time, allowing marketers to easily collect additional information. Email confirmations of registrations are often sent automatically. The marketer can easily monitor the progress of the campaign, but doesn’t have to remember to send confirmations or make sure the tickets were mailed. This saves the staff hours of time.

Customer retention and loyalty. There is such a focus on using all types of personalization —not just personalized URLs — for lead generation that it’s easy to forget that this approach works as well to retain your existing customer base. When personalization plays to an already friendly crowd, its power is magnified. You can use personalized URLs to deepen that customer relationship and maintain and grow their loyalty.

Fundraising. One rapidly growing application for personalized URLs is fundraising. Although you can send recipients to a general URL, too, personalized URLs play upon the relationship between the recipient and the organization. Often, fundraising organizations have good records on donors that allow them to personalize the mini-site experience, matching images, text and solicitations based on the donor’s past history. The micro-sites might be populated with images from an alumni’s graduating class, for example, with comments from his or her teachers or professors that year.

Information dissemination. This category is very similar to customer service and customer loyalty, but it is sufficiently different (with a more “push” orientation) that it can be seen as its own category. At its core, this classification has “soft” benefits such as branding, company image and savings in administrative costs. These benefits are just as real as direct sales benefits and, for many marketers, just as compelling.

Measuring Success

Regardless of the type of campaign, tracking and measurement is critical to achieving long-term marketing goals. There are many different ways to measure personalized URL campaign success. These include response rate, conversion rate, cost per lead, cost per sale, revenues per sale, ROI and lifetime customer value. All of these speak to different aspects of the campaign, so multiple measure may need to be used.

It’s also important to keep in mind that Web metrics are different from print, so you’ll want to consider things like click-through rate (did people click through to different pages), form fill or survey completion rate, download rate (whether people downloaded PDFs or white papers), video view rate (if any) and whether or not people made it to the final thank-you page. Also whether they downloaded anything, took advantage of the offer and so on. You want to know to what extent people are interacting with the site.

Boiling It Down

Is it possible to boil down all of the information in a nutshell? If it were, it would be this: personalized URLs are simply a response mechanism. They don’t drive traffic in themselves. If you want to maximize your success with this approach, do the following.

1. Follow the best practices of direct marketing at large, including those for 1:1 (personalized) printing.

2. Take advantage of the unique opportunity that Internet-based applications provide to measure and track your results. Go beyond the “obvious” metrics to dig deeper and really mine the tremendous data resource you now have.

3. Use multiple channels to communicate the message. When possible, use multiple response mechanisms, as well. Not everyone responds the same way to the same media.

4. Commit to personalization for the long-term. Tweak, test and wrap results around to future campaigns to refine your program over time. There are best practices for personalization, but the details of how they are to be implemented are unique to your company, your goals and your customer base.

Like any other marketing program, personalization is a work in progress. Like any other investment, there is often an initial payback, but its true value is only discovered over time.